Backlisted - The Godwits Fly by Robin Hyde

Episode Date: November 29, 2021

Our guest is author Paula Morris, who joins us from Auckland to discuss the novel The Godwits Fly (1938) and the life of its author Iris Wilkinson AKA Robin Hyde. In recent years, Iris Wilkinson's writing has been rediscovered and restored to the canon of New Zealand literature, where it occupies a place alongside Katherine Mansfield's; The Godwits Fly is her highly autobiographical novel spanning the years 1910-28. Also this week, John has been captivated by Neurotribes, Steve Silberman's fascinating study of neurodiversity, while Andy revels in the forensic detail of Glenn Frankel's new book Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic. This episode wouldn't have happened without Rachael King or WORD Christchurch Festival: https://wordchristchurch.co.nz. Thanks Rachael!Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. so let me ask you both let me ask you paula and you ask you, Paula, and you, John Mitchinson, how long is it since you last saw one another? I'll let Paula go first. There's some dispute about how long it is since I saw John.

He sent me an email saying, I can't wait to see you again after 40 years. And I'm thinking, actually, you came to my flat in London, in Vauxhall, in the 90s for a party but but John has wiped this from his memory and has no recollection Paula that doesn't surprise me one of the things that hasn't gone yet is my memory but I wonder if it was just it must have been at a that that I think there probably are things I have repressed about that period of my life it was it was not my It was not the happiest time of my life, but I'm sure I would have remembered.

In Vauxhall. In Vauxhall, yeah, Cremsworth Road in Vauxhall. I always lived on the same double-page spread of the A to Z, no matter where I moved in London. But as I discovered. But you were in London for a long time, right? Well, I went to University of New York, then I worked briefly in Manchester, then I was in London working at the BBC and then at various record companies. I didn't really see a lot of people

from my past, speaking of repressed things. So before that, to answer Andy's question, we really hadn't seen each other since the 80s when we were undergraduates at the University of Auckland and John left to go back to the UK. And that was really the last time we'd spent any time together. Well, this is so nice. And also we should just say, Paula, just tell us where you are. I am in Auckland, New Zealand, which is my hometown. It's just amazing, isn't it? We never, this is one of the incredible upsides about not being able to leave the house for nearly two years, is we're able to bring people in from all over the world. It's so exciting for us to be able to do this, and it's so great to see you.

And we should also say, before we start, that the reason that we're doing this podcast in the way that we're doing it is that we were originally booked to talk to to paula at the christchurch word festival uh obviously we we were originally we were hoping to go out to christchurch but that didn't happen and then i remember the next thing we were going to do was to do a live event with i think paula you were going to be live at the festival and we would have been beamed in uh to the far away near the rather kind of interesting way of doing live plus kind of virtual at the same time. But then lockdown, it happened in Christchurch. Are you still in lockdown in Auckland?

It happened in Auckland. The festival went ahead. I was just banned from attending. So all Aucklanders were disinvited from everything. It's November now since my birthday, which was the 18th of August. I've basically been in my apartment more than once. Well, we know what it feels like. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We're so pleased to be going ahead with this. And Rachel, if you're listening, I know you will be. This one's for you. So thanks very much for making this happen. Andy, before we move on to literary things, can I just establish one thing that I feel, and I may be wrong, but I feel that John Mitchinson is to blame for me taking a paper called Marxism in Perspective at Stage 1 at the University of Auckland. He was doing it and his various fashionable friends like Gil Harris was taking it.

So I was talked into taking it. And I have to say it is the one C plus on my university record, a blot, because I had no grasp of the subject. I mean, you just have to say Hegel and it sends me dozing. I'm sorry, Paula. It was The Times. What can I tell you? Theory was in the air. John, have you retained either?

Have you retained either Marxism or perspective? None whatsoever. either have you retained either marxism or perspective none whatsoever there are people who claim i base my look on marx which is um the idea that i have a look is something i struggle with but you know well johnny shall we um let's let's accelerate into the future okay come on let's go hello and welcome to backlisted the podcast that gives new life to old books today you find us looking into the backyard of a small square wooden house in one of the poorer quarters of Wellington, New Zealand, in the years before the First World War. A wattle tree with green-gold branches casts evening shadows across the yard

where three girls splash and shout as they squeeze into a washing cup that they are using as a bath. From inside the house there rises the slow crescendo of a couple quarreling i'm john mitchinson the publisher of unbound the platform where readers crowdfund books they really want to read i think that's a weird thing you've done there it implies that we are like a couple quarrel it's like we're like we're we're walter matta and jack lemon or something which of course we are. If the cat fits. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously, and we're joined today by a new guest.

Yay! Paula Morris, who's joining us all the way from New Zealand. Welcome, Paula. Hi, Paula. Kia ora, and thank you for having me. Delighted to have you. Thank you for phoning in. Paula Morris is an award-winning fiction writer and essayist of English and Maori descent. She returned to her native Auckland, New Zealand in 2015 after almost 30 years of living overseas in York, Manchester, London, New York, not to be confused with York, Iowa City, New Orleans, not to be confused with Orléans, Glasgow and Sheffield, in that order.

She is an Associate Professor at the University of Auckland, and she is the Director of the Master of Creative Writing Programme and active in community, local council and school writing initiatives. Paula is the founder of the Academy of New Zealand Literature, an organisation that promotes the work of contemporary New Zealand writers. And of, please help me out, Paula? Whare Rangi. An online Maori literature hub that will launch at the end of November. Paula is also a fanatical student of Korean film and drama

and is about to launch her own website with career scene, with reviews. I am, yes. Wow, that's an amazing thing. In 2020, she and photographer haru samashima published shining land looking for robin hyde and can we both just say uh paula you sent us a copy of both being john a copy of the book and i've been reading it today what a terrific book that is um we i loved it did you john i'll put you on the spot obviously Absolutely beautiful Again it's that thing

when you get words and photographs working together I can't imagine that book not being with those remarkable photographs it's a beautiful bit of work and as everybody will see very relevant to what we're about to talk about

And Paula we'll ask you I'm going to ask you to read a bit from that later on as well so that's great And as everybody will see, very relevant to what we're about to talk about. And Paula, I'm going to ask you to read a bit from that later on as well. So that's great. And you and Haru are working on a follow-up project sanctioned by Robin Hyde's son, the late Derek Chalice, that explores her letters from and experiences in China and Britain in the last year of her life, 1938 to 1939. Paula is also, it says here, desperate to finish work on her latest novel, Yellow Palace, set in Europe in the four months preceding the Brexit vote. Well, if you need, actually, you could go back into the Batlisted archive and listen to our increasingly disbelieving episodes as we approach that.

And she will do this over the southern summer, even if it kills her. How long have you been writing it? Since before the Brexit vote. So. Wow. But it's because I have so many other things going on and because I'm so involved reading other people's work and writing about other people and interviewing other people

that often that takes precedence over mine. Well, good luck. It's the Brexit vote, though. That shadow doesn't go anywhere. It just gets longer and darker. And for a while I thought, oh gosh, this book will be so irrelevant by the time I finish it, because Brexit will be over and done with. But no, on it goes, really. Worry not, at least on that score it'll never be over anyway appropriately enough the book that paul has chosen for us to discuss is the godwits fly by the aforementioned robin hyde

first published in london by hurston blackett in 1938 but before we travel across the globe like the intrepid godwits of the book's title, let me ask you our usual question. Andy, what have you been reading this week? I've been reading a book I've been really enjoying called Shooting Midnight Cowboy by Glenn Frankel, subtitled Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation and the Making of a Dark Classic. Have both you, John, and Paula, I mean, I have to to ask have you seen the film Midnight Cowboy I have and I won't ask you if you like Midnight Cowboy I'm just going to assume that you do like

Midnight Cowboy I am assuming many listeners will be familiar with the film Midnight Cowboy which was made in 1968 starring John Voight and Dustin Hoffman set in New York and the fifth feature film of British director John Schlesinger and the book Shooting Midnight Cowboy on one level does exactly what it says it's going to do it's an account of the shooting of the film Midnight Cowboy but just to tell everybody that on page 200, they haven't actually started shooting Midnight Cowboy. That's the level of depth we're talking about here. And Schlesinger, of course, is a sort of member of the British New Wave of directors, although he wasn't very clubbable with people like Tony Richardson and Lindsay Anderson and they didn't like him much either but he he had had a string of successes in the UK he was the director of A Kind of Loving starring Alan Bates, Billy Lyatt of course starring Tom Courtney and Julie Christie, Darling starring Julie Christie again and Dirk Bogart. And then he made an adaptation with Nick Rogue as his director of photography of Thomas Hardy's Far From The Madding Crowd,

bringing together Julie Christie again, Alan Bates again, Terrence Stamp. Everyone set for it to be a huge box office success. And it was anything but. It was a terrible flop. And that's the starting point of Shooting Midnight Cowboy. John Schlesinger in London thinking, I've screwed everything up. And almost out of sheer desperation and perversity, he thinks, I know what I need to do. I need to get out of the UK and I need to go to America but I won't go to Hollywood I won't go to the west coast I'm going to go to the east coast and I'm going to go to the broken failing city of New York and I am going to make a film about a gay hustler

in an era where hustling and being gay in New York were very problematic, not to say illegal. And indeed, Schlesinger himself was gay, somewhat in the closet. And he options a novel by a writer called James Leo Herlihy, who is a contemporary or associate of Tennessee Williams, or associate of Tennessee Williams, called Midnight Cowboy about a hustler from Texas trying to survive on the streets of New York and his friendship with Ratso Rizzo, Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo. Shooting Midnight Cowboy is a book about the fraying of the old culture and the arrival of

the new culture and particularly gay life in America in the 1950s and 60s, which is why it takes to page 200 to get to the shooting of Midnight Cowboy. And I found this both fascinating and rather moving to see the various protagonists of this book, the director, the actors, John Barry, who did the score, Waldo Salt, who wrote the screenplay, finding their way into a new way of telling stories on film that had not been available to them five years earlier. So I really recommend the book. I'm just going to read you a little bit about Anne Roth, who was the costume designer on Midnight Cowboy. Anne Roth started from a simple premise.

Costume designers don't just make outfits, they make characters. Working in New York, she created or picked out every costume for every character in Midnight Cowboy, and she travelled to Florida and Texas for the location shoots as well. Like Waldo Salt the screenwriter she was on the set continually and was part of the core team at the heart of the movie making process. I outfitted everybody including the people who worked in the cafeteria scenes she says proudly. A costume designer should always be there. She started with Ratso Rizzo. The idea was to find and obtain the clothes he would have bought from the places he would have bought them,

or in Ratso's case, the places he might have stolen them from. One of the names that dominated New York movie marquees during the 1960s was that of the Italian film idol, Marcello Mastroianni. So Roth figured that if you were a roustabout Italian kid from the Bronx like Ratso and you thought you had arrived, you wanted to look like the beautifully dressed charismatic star Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita and Eight and a Half, which means you likely wore a white suit. I knew Dustin wouldn't do the whole movie in a white suit, but that's where I started, Roth recalls. Next door to the Port Authority bus terminal at West 42nd Street and 8th Avenue was a shop with a sidewalk table out front piled with cheap clothes.

Roth found a pair of folded white pants with a grey line of dirt along the crease of each leg. They went for $12. Next she found a pair of shiny high-top black shoes with pointed toes at a store up 42nd Street towards Times Square. They were cockroach-in-the-corner shoes, she says. I had to have those. Then she bought a continental-cut purple suit and dyed it green. It was mambo and the cha-cha-cha and all that, a short jacket and a very skinny little behind. It looked to her like some high school kid had rented it for his prom and then chucked it into a trash can after he threw up on it. And finally, she bought a burgundy red shirt from a boyfriend who had a clothing store uptown. And she says, I remember doing Dustin's dirty

fingernails on him. And I remember putting his pompadour a little up. And I said, put the red shirt on. Don't tuck it in all the way. Just make it messy. And we looked into the mirror, and there's this guy who could easily sleep on a pool table. Sounds like bliss, actually. One of my favourite books that I've read this year. It's just glorious, glorious book.

So that's Shooting Midnight Cowboy by Glenn Frankel. John, what have you been reading this week? Well, I've been reading, as you know, I'm engaged in a project at the moment, a writing project, which is killing me. But occasionally, I get to, as part of the research, I read something that really, really blows me away. And the book I'm just going to talk about is a book called Neurotribes by the New York journalist Steve Silberman, which is essentially a kind of a history of, I mean, if I say it's a history of autism, you know, I can feel people sort of reaching for the off switch. It's a story of

such horrifying and compelling human drama, I think really, really beautifully told and unraveled. I mean, autism is one of those things that really until the 70s and indeed the 80s wasn't understood at all. And the decades of children being misdiagnosed or not diagnosed at all and consigned that the only way of dealing with autism for a long, long time was to put kids into institutions where they were obviously suffered horribly. He unravels, starting with Hans Asperger in the 30s, who first really describes the condition. And then that is completely lost. And then it's kind of rediscovered by a guy called Leo Kanner in the States. And there are amazing heroes in this story.

The biggest heroes of all are the parents of the children who fight in the UK and the US to get the diagnosis changed and to get proper treatment. And it turns out, you know, there's an old adage in the book, if you've met one autistic person, you've met one autistic person. You know, the idea of neurodiversity, that people's brains are individual and different yes there are that there is this is a condition which is difficult it is a disability it's but it's also the story is an amazing uh kind of on one level an amazingly positive one because you know given the right context given the right social support uh and it's not just about being brilliant in in the

rain man although the story, interestingly enough, talking about Dustin Hoffman, the story I'm going to tell you about has a connection to Rain Man. Rain Man changed everything. It suddenly got everybody talking about autism and thinking about autism in a different way. And a lot of the campaigners, Ruth Christ-Sullivan, who's one of the big parent campaigners in the States, said, you know, it achieved in one year what they'd fought for 30 years. There's a great little story about a guy called Bill Schechter. Bill Schechter is one of the bases for the writer Bill Morrow

of Rain Man, based some of the character of Babbitt on Bill Schechter. Schechter had been institutionalised. He'd been abused. He'd actually had his scalp torn off so he wore a he wore a wig that he used to spray with uh l net so that it was it was literally solid he forms a friendship with uh with with morrow he's working in a kind of dime store cleaning up and uh morrow discovers he leaves morrow leaves minnesota and discovers that bill is being

they're going to send him back to what Bill calls the hellhole, which is where he stood. So there's just a little bit of him. So he's basically, he has to fight the Minnesota State Authority to see if he can get Bill off. So this is just a lovely little bit of writing here. On the day of the hearing, Morrow tied his long blonde hair into a ponytail and tucked it under his collar.

He also put on a sport coat and brought along a briefcase, which was empty, to complete the picture of a supremely competent conservator. That's a conservator. He's got to basically adopt this man who's 30 years older than him. To avoid unexpected outbursts during the hearing, he instructed Bill to stay mum. These people are tricky, buddy, so just let me do all the talking. Even with Morrow's makeover, however, the hearing did not go well. Sitting around a long table, the members of the board started grilling him with questions he hadn't prepared for, and he found himself lapsing into legal doublespeak that sounded absurd even to him. The men who would decide Bill's fate didn't seem to be buying any of it.

Basically, their questions focused on only one thing. Why was this 20-something trying to become the legal guardian of this older, blatantly retarded man in ill health? Suddenly, Bill interrupted the somber proceeding and took matters into his own hands. Let us pray, he declared. Instinctively, the members of the board bowed their heads respectfully. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. He began, staying with the cadence of the Lord's Prayer but substituting his own life story. And thank you, dear Lord, for bringing me my buddy, Mr. Barry. He takes good care of me. I got a bird named Chubby. I got a good life now.

And I don't want ever to go back to that hellhole. You know that, Lord. He continued on in that vein until the concluding, Amen. After a brief silence, the man at the head of the table cleared his throat and said, Well, I think that says it all. He signed an official form, slid it down to the end of the table. Bill christened the form his on my own papers.

He was officially a free man. Oh, that's good. That's good writing too, right? You know, that's a good story well told. Really great bit of work. I saw that, I don't know if you know this, John, but I saw that Steve Silverman, isn't it? Do you know what book Steve Silverman was the co-author of?

This is really pleasing. He's the co-author with David Schenk of Skeleton Key, a dictionary of the grateful dead. Oh, my God. So that guy has range. Yeah. One that Samuel Johnson had written a book about deadheads as well. Okay, well, that's great. I think we'll move on to the main part of the conversation. outsiders or the marginalized in a way. But listening to you talk, Angie reminded me of this fantastic short piece by Lillian Ross in The New Yorker from 1985, and it's called With Fellini.

Are you familiar with it? So Fellini and Mastroianni and all sorts of people like, I think, Claudio Cardinale come to New York so he can be honored. And Lillian Ross drives around in a big car with them when they go to Connecticut. So it's a really fantastic piece. And then listening to John talk, because I have to get Korean drama in here, obviously, there's a TV series called It's Okay to Not Be Okay. And one of the characters played by Oh Jung-se, and I'm probably horribly mispronouncing his name

because I haven't done my summer school language course yet, plays someone on the autism spectrum who's looked after by his younger brother. And I've seen this particular actor in lots of different dramas. And I have to say he is phenomenal in this one. And so if people are interested in Korean drama and autism, it's a good place to start. Oh, that sounds great. And what's it called, Paula? It's OK to not be OK.

But that particular character, I think, is the heart of the series. And I couldn't take my eyes off him whenever he was on screen because you felt the complexity of his individuality as a character and as a person, as you're saying. He wasn't simply a diagnosis. He was his own particular person. The book chat will continue on the other side of this message. Well, now we're going to go into the main part of the podcast now. And to take us there, we have an important figure from 20th century New Zealand. important figure from 20th century New Zealand. made a galabine roll along covered wagon roll along whoa there

baldy whoa now boy sit right still while I talk to the folks my friends here's the old covered wagon

just rolled up bringing you all some of the good old tunes from the prairie do either of you know who that is no

I don't no it's Newaland's king of country tex morton recorded there in the 1930s he was new zealand's first country and western singer and he had a successful career in new zealand and then he moved to the states and had a successful career in the states in the 40s and 50s but that was recorded on new zealand radio in the 1930s um and we're going to was recorded on New Zealand radio in the 1930s. And we're going to hear a bit more from Tex later on, who's my new obsession.

John, could you tell us about The Godwits Fly? What is the novel The Godwits Fly? The Godwits Fly is the fifth and last novel by Robin Hyde. The nom de guerre, as she called it, of Iris Wilkinson, a New Zealand poet, journalist, and writer of fiction, whose reputation has grown both in New Zealand and internationally since her work was rediscovered in the 1970s. The Godwit's Fly was first published in New Zealand only in 1970, which I didn't know until I looked at it, and has been in print there ever since. And in the UK, it was republished in 2016 by Persephone Books. So it's a lyrical, impressionistic novel that charts the life of the Hannay family

in Wellington, New Zealand, beginning just before the First World War and stretching into the early 1920s. And the story focuses on the second eldest daughter, Eliza, who gradually discovers her vocation as a poet. And it's closely based on Wilkinson's own life. So before I ask Paula the traditional ballistic question I want to just on a point of order Paula do we refer to this author as Robin Hyde or Iris Wilkinson or what? It's a very interesting question Andy Andy, because she saw herself as both

people. And when she died by suicide in London in 1939, she left a note and she signed it with both names, Robin Hyde and Iris Wilkinson. I think admitting that she was two women and had two personas in a way. All her family and friends called her Iris. In the New Zealand literary scene, she was known as Iris, but people also knew that she published under the name Robin Hyde. I assume in the UK where most of her books were published first, that people only knew her as Robin Hyde.

But we could call her Iris if you want in a friendly way. That's what her son, the late Derek Chalicell, was called her, Iris. I mean, it's worth saying that the name Robin came from, that was the name she gave to the, she had two sons, and one was stillborn. And the stillborn baby, which appears in this novel, was called Robin. And I think, was it her dad's name was Hyde? No, it was the father of the baby.

Of the father's name, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah, Frederick de Malford Hyde. So the baby was called Christopher Robin Hyde. And she had either stillborn or died just after birth. When she was 20 years old, and it was a very traumatic event in her life. Obviously, she'd been sent off to Sydney to have the baby in quiet shame, as all New Zealanders know, when you don't want things to be known about your terrible behaviour, you go to Australia. And she had her baby, she lost her baby, and then she came back to New Zealand and had what was then termed a nervous breakdown,

leading to a whole series of depressions and instabilities and great sadnesses in her life. So Iris is okay. We're going to call her Iris, as you said, is a friendly thing to do. Also, I'd like everyone to know that therefore i resisted the strong temptation to include an excerpt from split ends is song iris from uh wayata is that right wayata is that how i say it that's close 1981 lp but anyway um paula when did you first read The Godwits Fly or when did you first encounter the work of Robin Hyde stroke Iris Wilkinson?

I first heard of her in the 80s when I was at university. And I would like to pretend to you that that's when I read it, but that would be a lie because I didn't. I didn't study New Zealand literature at all at university. I did a little bit at high school in the manner of those days. So I studied Catherine Mansfield and Frank Sargesson, who were both short story writers. But I heard of The Godwits Fly because it was very much in the spirit of feminist rediscoveries of lost women writers of the era. It was only when I returned to New Zealand in 2015

that I really started reading Hyde's work, specifically The Godwits Fly, and then also Passport to Hell, which is now regarded as a very important, largely non-fiction documentation of the trench experience for ordinary men in World War I, and just became really interested and fascinated with her again. And so when I was asked to write an essay on anyone for this particular new series of books, I immediately chose Robin Hyde, even though I at that point had not read everything she'd written.

Obviously, I went down that rabbit hole. And tell us what it is in a nutshell. I know there's so much more to say, but what was it about reading it, when you did read it, that really grabbed you? What was the thing that was unexpected, if you like, about it? I mean, John referred to The Godwits Fly

as lyrical and impressionistic, and that's absolutely true. And I think perhaps for a long time that put me off a little bit. But one thing I think she does really well, and particularly in Passport to Hell, is visceral writing, vivid, visceral writing, very concrete details, textures, sounds, smells. As a person, by the way, she was really, really oversensitive to sound. And so you often get a lot of that. She notices sounds and noise and it's all on the page. And there's something incredibly immersive

about reading her books. You really do feel transported to a particular place in time. She does that extremely well. And so even though, for example, as you're saying, The Godwits Fly, So even though, for example, as you're saying, the Godwits fly, a lot of it takes place around World War I in Wellington, a city of which I'm not terribly fond. Because I myself lived for almost a year in Berenpore, very near to where she was living as a child. It's more expensive now, but the houses are still terrible and the walls are full of mice and there's hedgehogs lurking under everyone and the southerlies roar up from Antarctica and shake all the fragile wooden houses on their little legs. But she evokes it in a way that still feels very fresh and I think it's really gratifying to read a book that is a hundred years old and not to feel somehow incredibly remote in the place it's describing. Even though things have changed so dramatically,

she makes them feel alive. And in that, I was trying to think of a similar book in a way, and I was thinking of Jean Rees's Voyage in the Dark, written a little bit after the fact, but set in Edwardian England, and also the young woman on the margins of things, and everything being a bit skimpy and a bit shabby. And I feel that sense as well in Robin Hyde's work. We're always comparing things. I certainly am to Jean Reys on this podcast and I'm almost embarrassed to say I completely agree with you the land the use of language is totally different from Rhys

but yes I absolutely agree with that Paula that sense of the displaced also somebody operating under another name right writing under a pseudonym and wondered also, because I was thinking that I saw the comparison more with Jean Rees than with other modernist writers of the era. I was looking up other books that were published the same year as The Godwits Fly, where things like Brighton Rock came out that year, Scoop by Evelyn Waugh. And I thought Scoop's really interesting

because, you know, written about a journalist going to another place and reporting back. At that time, Hyde went to China and was on the front line of where the Japanese were invading, got injured, got missing in action for a while, managed to stumble away along rail tracks and finally escape. But when she was in London, just stumble away along rail tracks and finally escape. But when she was in London, 38 and 39, she published a book called Dragon Rampant about what she had seen in China. And I thought there's such a world of difference between the two approaches of the idea of the journalist in the other country. One has the attitude of empire, I think. And the other one, the attitude of someone who comes from the margins of empire.

And that's the case with Jean Rees. It was the case with Catherine Mansfield. And it's absolutely the case with Robin Hyde. John, can I ask you, because you have such a connection with New Zealand and you lived in New Zealand for many years, you hadn't read this novel before, had you? Did it evoke New Zealand for you and your experience of the country?

Yes. before had you did it evoke new zealand for you and your experience of the country uh yes and and um the thing that has been it's i have to say i'm so pleased paula that you you chose it because i hadn't read it and again it's this thing of how how could a novel of this quality and and range not be you you know, I know there are probably historical reasons she published it in England, but it's very, very evocative in two ways. One is that it's as good a novel as I've read about that strange feeling of, I mean,

she mentions it several times in the book, is that the connection with England, that a country trying to find itself, trying to find its own identity. I mean, we maybe talk about this. There's quite a lot of ambiguity about the Maori who are already in New Zealand and trying to work out the relationship with that. But there's just the sensual detail of the smell and the feel of plants it's not what it is is is european vegetation

that's been brought and at the same time new zealand and the two are in an uneasy balance and a little bit and then you've got the kind of the big the big issue which is new zealand is new new zealand's life still i'm i'm guessing is to a large degree defined with over there whether it's the old country england or going to new york and i was always struck by my friends in new zealand would know more about what was going on in new york what was being shown in the main in the galleries in new york than people who lived in New York. It's just a completely different kind of New Zealand novel that I hadn't read before.

And I'm really, really, I am now excited to read her other stuff. Well, let me, I'd like to run something past both of you then, which feels relevant to this part of the conversation. feels relevant to this part of the conversation. This novel was published in Britain in the 1930s and did nothing. And as far as I can see, didn't receive a review in... No, that's not true. It did receive one review, perfectly OK, mildly good review. And then it didn't get... i couldn't find another review i dug

through the the archives at the london library to try and find reviews and i found one from the tls in 1974 when it was uh reissued in in new zealand funnily enough it's when it was first published in new zealand right is in the 70s and that edition is the one that gets reviewed in the TLS and I just wanted to read this to you and get your reaction to this and bear in mind this is not quite 50 years ago this was written it's part of a roundup of five novels from New Zealand in their various ways all five novels open windows onto the colonial experience, each revealing a subtly different aspect of it. Yet it is not the landscape beyond the window that changes.

That still and brooding country of lakes and mountains, fjords and giant forests, but the individual's apprehension of it spurred on by the human instinct to absorb and tame what is strange and unknowable. One curious consequence is that a good deal of New Zealand fiction strikes the reader as oddly old-fashioned, like the reverberation of an echo thrown across a gully. It is rather as if, being obscurely daunted by the very nature of the enterprise, the neophyte practitioner has preferred to buckle himself into the armour of an accepted literary convention rather than taking risks with form when the content seems so slippery and elusive. Andy, which writers were being reviewed in that

particular review? Jane Mander, Margaret Escott and George Chamier and William Satchell. Because it's interesting. I mean, Jane Mander's name persists, but otherwise they are not. They're not anyone that has really lasted. But it's really interesting that the time of that writing, Witte Ehmeyer was publishing his first books. And if you want to look at structural experimentation, you just have to look at his earliest novels to see something radically different being done compared with the British or Codd British tradition in which those other writers were operating. the British or Codd British tradition in which those other writers were operating. And it's just, well, it's always sad to me that more of our contemporary literature in particular receives no attention whatsoever elsewhere. Because when Robin Hyde was publishing Iris,

you did publish in the UK. London was the place you published. Auckland was a terrible backwater, which some would argue it still is. And within the imperial world of publishing, New York and London were the dominant places. So all her books were published in London. That was the important place. And then they would filter through to the empire, just as they filter through now to the Commonwealth. So you have a situation with some New Zealand writers who are quite well known publishing really in Britain. Well, Kirsty Gunn is an example to speak of someone who is very influenced by Jean Rees or can be compared with Jean Rees. Emily Perkins is another. But there have always been interesting things going on here, and obviously increasingly in the last 10, 20 years that really

escaped the attention of the rest of the English language world because we may as well be literature and translation for the amount of exposure we get. And to speak to John's point a little bit earlier about Hai's experience of looking back to this lost homeland that she only gets to visit at the end of her life. And that her mother in particular was obsessed with her mother, an Australian-born nurse, went to go back to the homeland of England, stopped off at the Boer War, ended up getting knocked up to Iris Wilkinson's father, getting married and then ending up in New Zealand. Iris Wilkinson's father getting married and then ending up in New Zealand.

England was this great, lost, glorious home. My own mother was English and regarded herself as completely British. She told us once, this is a typical exchange with my mother, she was complaining my brother was going out with someone she didn't approve of. And she said, she's from West Auckland. And I said, we're from West Auckland. And she said, no, you're not. You're British. So that was my mother's point of view, which was unusual and eccentric. But I would say nowadays in New Zealand, there's less and less connection with Britain. Because also, I just want to say Auckland now is increasingly a Maori, Pacifica and Asian country, city, sorry.

It's a Pacifica city. It's the largest Polynesian city in the world, as we often say. I don't even know if it's true. There's an increasing Asian population for whom there is also a homeland. our homeland. For first and second generation Asian New Zealanders who have also been brought up with the notion of the ancestral home to which they feel a strong but remote connection, our allegiances are shifting, I think. But also, as you know, I mean, we're sitting here talking across many, many thousands of kilometers. This idea that you are only influenced in certain ways now as writers by what you can find in a local shop has completely changed.

We can read widely and roam widely around the world. I'd just like to go back to the point that the TLS reviewer is making there and say I just disagree with it straightforwardly. I know he's generalising over five novels, but in terms of saying that The Gobwit's Fly cleaves to old fashioned ways of novel writing and storytelling is just wrong. That's wrong. storytelling is just wrong that's wrong um i mean i found this quite a challenging read i i enjoyed it very much but actually there were quite a few sections which i had to read two or three times because um not so much the prose although the prose can be you know deeply poetic in terms of both syntax and uh feel of what she's trying to express. But also narratively, she likes making really unusual cuts and hops around, which require you to be on your metal, I found.

I found I could read about 30, 40 pages of this, and then I would need to set it down and let it settle. We must read some as well,, I mean, I do think the prose, there is prose of, I mean, really extraordinary prose in this novel. But I was struck that Iris came to look upon New Zealand, although she travelled hugely, she came to look upon New Zealand as her home, although she ended up taking her own life in London. And I know that

you have spent 30 years not living in New Zealand. And I'm just, I'm just, I suppose it's that and, you know, the, as I say, the overarching Godwit metaphor about distance is, I mean, I'm just intrigued as to why you think she in the end made that decision because it the book is definitely ambiguous about about about new zealand as as as as a place as a place that that you that your imagination can inhabit like carly the sister has got her imagination is is clearly looking looking outside new zealand towards you know her Zealand towards her Johannesburg man and her kind of sort of British royalty. So I mean, it's not exactly a question.

I'm just intrigued as to what it is that repels you and what it is that brings you back, I suppose. I was just thinking when you're talking there that Iris's family was very much a family of empire. I mean, her father was British via India, Indian army, then fighting in the Boer War. Her mother's English via Australia. And then they end up in New Zealand, perched there,

like so many people with an empire. Perched is exactly the word. They don't really belong and they don't really want to belong and they don't really understand what belonging is. And that's an ongoing conversation in any colonised country. At what point do people belong? Do they not belong? At what point can you truly be post-colonial?

So we're going to hear a reading from The Gold Which Fly in a minute, but first of all, in the light of what we've been talking about, about the gap between old colonial New zealand traditions of new zealand and where the country is now i i just wanted to play this piece of music this is the first piece of one of the first pieces of music ever recorded in new zealand in february 1927 and it's the soprano Anna Hato and a Maori choir recorded together so old and new let's hear

that now The Choir singing. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 CHOIR SINGS I think that's beautiful. I mean, I think those ghosts singing to us from a century ago, what a spine-tingling thing. And also 1927 when Iris was alive and living in New Zealand and working as a journalist and may have seen that. Who knows? And that is kind of almost New Zealand's alternative national anthem, isn't it, Paula?

Yeah, John and I could happily sing that for you, Andy, quite beautifully, though we would only know the words to the first verse in the chorus. It's all right. I'm going to ask you. That's how we're going out. I haven't told you that. That's how we're finishing this show.

I'm always up for singing. You don't even have to praise me on it. Tie it all together. So, Paula, could you read us something from The God Which Flies so we can give people a flavour of the novel? Yes, and when you were talking about it, Andy, I thought in some ways you can approach The Godwits Fly like a collection of linked stories.

I often found with a chapter I wanted to read it and digest it as its own standalone story. This is from one of the early chapters called Bird of My Native Land and the young Eliza, very much based on Iris's own recollections, is at school. Sometimes in class, Mr. Bellew talked about the Godwits who fly every year from the top part of the North Island to Siberia, thousands of miles without a stop. They fly north, they fly north. They lined a dell one night with secret olive wings and next morning were gone, Mr Bellew said with melancholy satisfaction, and the eye of a white man has never looked upon their flight. Something there had been,

something delicate, wild and far away, but it was shut out behind the doors of yesterday lost beyond the hills and sticking a dead twig of it into a hole in the playground or a rotten poem in the school journal only made it sickly and unreal you didn't really have to think about it maoris godw, bird of my native land. Attending to it all was a duty call to a sickbed. History began slap bang in England. At the Battle of Hastings in 1066, William of Normandy defeated King Harold.

A picture showed King Harold very angry and frightened because William had tricked him into taking an oath on the bones of the saints. You were sorry for him and didn't want him to be beaten, but of course he was. Especially you wish the arrow had been anywhere but in the eye. Normans in England said berf and muton at first, and the old Saxon tongues struggled and died out till nobody understood it any more than people here understood Maori. You had to know that much or you failed in your examination.

You were English and not English. It took time to realise that England was far away and you were brought up on bluebells and primroses and daffodils and robins in the snow. up on bluebells and primroses and daffodils and robins in the snow. Even the Christmas cards were always robins in the snow. One day with a little shock of anger, you realised there were no robins and no snow. That's a perfect passage to have read, actually. That's beautiful. And Andy, I should say that before I read this, because obviously I came to it late in life, I had written something a little bit similar in a story I wrote called Red Christmas where it's set in West Auckland around a Christmas time during what used to be known here

as the inorganic rubbish collection where people put stuff out outside their houses and then people maraud past in vans and cars taking things. And I've got three quite poor kids doing some marauding. And the title Red Christmas is an Icelandic term. I had an Icelandic neighbour in Iowa City and he said in Iceland they called it Red Christmas if there wasn't any snow. And I thought, well, we have one of those every year in New Zealand. But one of the characters thinks about all this imagery to do with robins in particular, which we don't have in New Zealand, and snow, which we'll see on windows and Christmas cards. It's just so completely meaningless here. So a hundred years later, there's less of it now, but there's still this notion that

our Christmas is somehow a wrong version of the real thing in the northern hemisphere and I think a hundred years ago that was an intense feeling. There's a character I want to ask you about, Eliza's parents in a minute because that's a particularly gruesome and enjoyable aspect of this novel but there's a there's an important character we haven't heard from or about yet. I've been centre manager at the Pakorokoro Miranda Shorebird Centre for the last 27 years. Unfortunately the numbers of godwits are declining and many other shorebirds in our flyaway are following the same pattern.

Since I've been here the numbers of godwits on the Firth have essentially halved and that's pretty much reflected in the population. Well these godwits are part of our culture they've been you know they're embedded in in New Zealand culture but in the last couple of the last 20 years the knowledge we have about them has steadily expanded and so and each each advance of knowledge has just emphasized yet again how extraordinary these birds are for what they do their migrations their their movements from here to the breeding grounds in Alaska the non-stop migration flights the kind of things they do. Their migrations, their movements from here to the breeding grounds in Alaska, the non-stop migration flights, the kind of things they do in order to make those flights. Everywhere you look, this is just an astonishing story.

So Paula, just explain to us then, why is the novel called The Godwits Fly and what's the symbolic nature? I mean, it's kind of tied in with what we've already been talking about, about how New Zealanders see themselves and how the rest of the world sees New Zealand. New Zealanders are restless, I think. I mean, because of various lockdowns, I've now been in New Zealand continuously for almost two years. And I haven't been in New Zealand continuously for two years since I was a

teenager. And I know your listeners can't see my very youthful appearance, but I have not been a teenager for some time, really since the 80s. So we are restless travellers because we are in an island nation. And so to go anywhere, even our close neighbours like Samoa or Fiji or Australia, you know, it's a substantial plane flight. But for Hyde's generation, there was a sense that there was a choice. You know, if you went off to the UK, as many, you know, notable figures in New Zealand history did, I'm thinking about Dan Davin, for example, or John Mulgan. They went to fight. They went to be Rhodes scholars. They went to work at

the Oxford University Press. They had a choice to make. C.K. Stead's referred to it, I think, as the great either-or. That choice no longer is framed in the same way. You can go, well, before COVID, you could go away and come back, go away and come back. I wrote a short book, a long form essay called On Coming Home When I Returned, about this whole notion of exiles and immigration and where you belong. And I think for this sort of restless return and departure of the Godwits was something that was immensely interesting to hide, to Robin hide, to Iris Wilkinson. Because until she left for England on that fateful final trip, she had not been anywhere except to Sydney to lose her baby. She had really been very much, you know, they'd arrived when she was a baby and she had been grounded here. And it was an

interesting time period that I'm particularly fascinated in because almost all the men she knew, almost all of them were war veterans in one way or another, whether it was the Boer War or the First World War, and they were a very traumatised generation. I felt the portrayal of the parents. First of all, the mother who is put upon yet suffocating at the same time the father who in a very contemporary way expresses his rage through political engagement

while not being really politically engaged at all just being a sap i imagine it was very tough Paula for her family to read this highly autobiographical novel wasn't it yeah I mean and I would say Iris herself would say that she came to an understanding with her mother that her mother actually was ultimately helpful and supportive in her own way which is very much the way of the times. Her mother read the book and didn't want it in the house. She didn't want her other daughters reading it, hide her three sisters. She certainly didn't want her husband reading it. And it's quite interesting to me that in the 60s, the 1960s, long after Iris had died, her parents had died, her sisters, her three sisters did all they could to stop Derek, her son, Iris had died, her parents had died, her sisters, her three sisters,

did all they could to stop Derek, her son, Iris' son, write a biography along with someone else. One of them even got taken into psychiatric care and the other tried to allege that it was because the book was coming because they were really obsessed with what they saw as a dark family secret, which was that she'd had two children out of wedlock, as we used to say in the olden days, that this would be well known. Now, of course, anyone who'd read The Godwits Fly knew pretty much about one of them, and it was no surprise. But this sort of Edwardian repression of the family,

where the mother is maintaining these values of respectability and gentility, it doesn't matter how little money you have, as long as you're respectable, that the work of Iris somehow completely undermined and subverted all those attempts to be respectable. So, yeah, the writing was not popular. The poems were one thing. And in fact, she has a chapter in this book where Eliza's father, you know, goes to a shop and finds their poems. I'm really interested as to, she has a breakdown

and there's a doctor who really helps her. The doctor suggests that she write this book though, right? Yeah, I was going to she write this book though, right? Yeah, I was going to say that this book is almost like an early example of sort of writing therapy. The doctor you're talking about, Dr. Gilbert Tottle, was her psychiatrist at what was then called the Avondale Mental Hospital and she lived on and off for four years in a building that's still there, which she referred to as Grey Lodge.

Haru Samashima and I were able to infiltrate the building and go up to the attic where Dr. Tothill made it possible for her to write so she could be up there alone with her typewriter. Enormously prolific. That's where she wrote a huge number of books and articles. It was supporting her whole writing life. But yes yes part of her work was to write a journal or a personal history for dr tottle and that material much of it you see in godwits fly and we should make the point as well that she her first novel is published in 1936 passport to hell she dies in 1939 and all her novels are published between 1936 and her death three years later. So she writes five novels in three years. in terms of what's driving that. But there is a sense to which she's been emancipated into putting this stuff out there and getting it.

But while also, as you said, writing journalism and reportage and incredibly prolific. Well, she had to write to make money. This is one thing about Robin Hyde. Unlike Catherine Mansfield, she had no little trust fund helping her out. She had to make money and not just for herself, but for the son, Derek, who was living with foster parents, because not only could she not look after him really physically and realistically, socially she couldn't. She would not be able to have a job as a single mother. She would be an absolute pariah. So he was a secret of sorts, but she needed to earn money. And that's in fact why she came to the UK

in 1938, 39, because she was trying to make money and thought London would be the place. She wanted to adapt one of her novels into a play as something that went nowhere. She was really hopeful of earning money, but she was completely derailed by her own mental struggles and also, I think, by the PTSD she suffered after the war in China and the fact that she came to England, which was still, you know, Europe was still obsessed with the Spanish Civil War, the big war looming. I mean, she died just a few weeks before World War II broke out or began.

And she found no one interested in what was going on in Asia. She did predict that the Japanese would not stop at China and she saw it happening, what was to happen in Asia and into the Pacific. I think she felt like some sort of prophet of doom who was not being listened to at all. So, John, have you got a bit to read for us? Yeah, well, I love this because it's set in a bookshop and it's a dad doing a dad thing,

a slightly annoying dad thing of rearranging the volume that's got her poetry in called Stranger Face. And he's making sure that it's in prime display in the bookshop. And the bookshop assistant comes up to him and says, the manager's come out and has asked what's going on. And the bookshop assistant says, this man, John Glared, and Sims amended it to, this gentleman, he keeps moving the books about, sir,

on the poetry counter. He's done it at least half a dozen times. And when I put the books back in their proper order, he waits till my back's turned, then he deliberately interferes again. Simms began to feel that he was wronged. His voice trembled with indignation and hurt pride. I ask you, sir, how am I to keep stock of my own counters if I can't arrange the books without the public stepping in interfering? What does he interfere with? Mr. Hanson still believed in a faded way that the customer, even escaping customer is preferably right this little thing sir stranger face paper covered

dangled like a dead rat in mr sim's contemptuous paw right middle top he puts it in center pages full spread with wordsworth on the one side and tennyson on the other how can you expect to sell a book if you keep it under the counter, done up in a female's leg band, snarled John. Mr. Hanson said gravely, this is a local production. I'm afraid local productions don't do us much good. The public won't look at them. He swept wide white hands, exonerating his shop, damning the public. He swept wide white hands, exonerating his shop, damning the public. Can't you tell poetry when you read it?

Local production, you're a local shop, aren't you? You live by local custom, don't you? Then what do you mean, letting snippets like him look down their noses? I suppose a poet's a poet, even born in this country or in the middle of the Sahara Desert. A very poor bit of book production, sighed Mr Hanson. John said stubbornly, well, read the verses, can't you? Surely if they're good, you can do something about it. As it happens, sir, I have read this book, and my opinion is, Mr. Hanson's voice grew solemn, as if he were pronouncing on a vintage wine or a cigar, that in spite of its unfavourable appearance, these verses are very creditable. Very creditable indeed. But the misfortune is, there's no sale for a book of this type.

Well, if there's no sale, can't you make one? Well, sir, from the outside covers, it doesn't look good enough to recommend as a Christmas present. You know what I mean? There's nothing between the people who buy seven and sixp pennies and the people who buy Christmas cards, unless it's mottos and little books of that sort. Mr. Hanson indicated a shoveled counter whose little flowers and bright wayside thoughts were systematically poured over by unhappy fabric gloves looking for something between ninepence and one and six, please. Yes, just that sort of little thing. Oh, is the corner a little bit bent? Oh, I see it's reduced. The market is for cards and mottos, said Mr. Hanson somberly. Look at the Augustan series, beautiful little books, and yet I can't give them away. I estimate the entire poetry sales in this

country is under 300, unless there's made name or a very special appeal. And in the case of this little book, there is not. Of course, sir, you may tell me when we get inside. It's a different matter. But who gets inside? Who gets inside? Brilliant. It's how times have changed. So I found a thing when I was preparing for this episode, which is one of my favourite essays or bits of writing

that I've ever found in connection with a book on Backlisted. And that's saying something 151 episodes in. And it is by a genuinely fantastic essay by Kirsteen Moffat called The Piano as Symbolic Capital in New Zealand Fiction, 1860 to 1940. And it is a really good essay, which I found totally fascinating, about what pianos represent in New Zealand writing. And there's this specific thing about The Godwits Fly, where the TLS was saying, oh, it seems old-fashioned.

Listen to this. This is what Kirsteen Moffat says about the function of the Hannay family's piano in The Godwits Fly. It's brilliant, this. In some ways, it can be argued that Hyde is writing against aspects of an inherited British literary tradition, which had established and codified a symbiotic relationship between the piano and middle-class female respectability,

marriageability and domesticity. Perceptively dissecting the Godwit lure of Britain, Hyde also writes of the need for New Zealand creative artists to find a voice, subject matter and style that is distinctively New Zealand. The 19th century British literary tradition to which Hyde was an heir but also an antagonist was steeped in the trope of the piano playing gentlewoman. Significantly it is Carly the good daughter who plays the piano. Her rebellious sister Eliza, in other words Iris, Hyde's autobiographical protagonist, turns to literature rather than to music for her creative outlet and to passion rather than propriety for emotional and sexual satisfaction. Eliza aligns herself with her socialist father who seeks to define himself as authentically working class. For Hyde, piano

playing is a sign of bourgeois conformity. Thus, while she has a profound understanding of social hierarchies and of the seductive allure of the objects which are seen to enhance social status, her socialist feminist perspective means that she writes satirically about her mother and Carly's pursuit of social, cultural and economic capital, constantly critiquing their empty acquisition of status markers rather than cultivating a rich individual in a life. This is highlighted once again by Hyde's symbolic treatment of the piano. Carly regards the ability to play it as an asset in her life's mission of marrying well and thus cementing and perhaps enhancing her social position. As Carly plays she admires the quote little pink discs of her cucumber and lemon soaked fingernail. She manicures them and plays the piano in the hope of attracting Trevor St. John who both she and her mother view as a

ticket to respectability and prosperity. That's lit crit at its best because it's cutting right to the heart of what the novel is about. The social status of the characters, their psychological status, and actually what I think is the great appeal for me of the novel, the love-hate relationship between the family members, which is in constant flux. You know how in a family, some weeks or days, it's mum and one child against dad and another child. But the allegiances shift all around. I thought this novel was so great for that.

But also, as that essay points out, putting it in a bigger social context. So, Paula, is there a part of your wonderful books that you could share with us now? Is there a part of your wonderful books that you could share with us now? Okay. So this is from Shining Land. Haru Samashima and I both took separate journeys around New Zealand to places where Haida spent time. But we did come together to go to the Grey Lodge at the Old Mantua Hospital together. Iris Wilkinson was a daughter, sister, friend, lover, mother, nobody's girlfriend, nobody's wife.

She persevered at the margins, an unmarried mother, a jobbing writer, moving from boarding house to batch to mental hospital, sometimes pitied or derided by her male peers. Robin Hyde published numerous books in New Zealand and Britain. She reported from centres of power and theatres of war. She was in the thick of things, in conversation with influential writers and editors. She and Ursula Bethel were the only women writers included in Alan Kernow's landmark Book of New Zealand Verse in 1945. In both guises, Dr Iris and Mr Hyde, she worked too hard, straining her physical and mental health. She could be very difficult. She had to keep a lot of secrets. I keep returning to Hyde's books, Passport to Hell and The Godwits Fly, Haru obsesses over check to your king. Like Hyde, we are investigators, curious about other people's lives. We are wanderers, outsiders.

Haru is Japanese, but has lived in New Zealand for almost 50 years. I've been back here for five years. This is the tenth city in which I've tried to make a home. Although I was born in Auckland, I feel unsettled as if I don't quite belong or don't wish to belong. I work too hard and achieve too little. I am secretive. I am a difficult woman. Hyde only once caught a plane from Nelson to Wellington, the shortest of journeys, in 1936. But she travelled the globe on ships and trains, charged by the events she witnessed, the testimony she heard and the world she imagined,

her experience distorted by wars both public and personal. I am caught in the hinge of a slowly opening door, she wrote, between one age and another How could she have known such a thing? We set off for some of the small places Hyde lived, wondering how they managed to contain her Everything is smaller in the past Hyde bursts from it, vivid and roaring, all the time wanting too much, too wild inside. I try to douse my own wildfires, hers I fear and pity and admire, watching them there in the distance, burning out of control. Amazing. Huge thanks to Paula for tempting us to cross the globe and discover the richly elusive and distinctive work of Iris Wilkinson. To Luke Eldridge for handling the sounds coming at him like Godwits from all directions. To Nicky Birch, who will no doubt extract the best of what we've recorded. And to Unbound for the chocolate teddy bears.

chocolate teddy bears you can download all 150 previous episodes plus follow links clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website at backlisted.fm and we're always pleased if you contact us on twitter and facebook and now in sound and pictures on instagram too you can also show your love directly by supporting our patreon at patreon.com forward slash backlisted we aim to survive without paid for advertising your generosity helps us do that all patrons get to hear backlisted episodes early for about the same price as a new straw hat at mr ebery's bargain store lot listeners get two extra lot listed a month our steamship cabin where the three of us gather around a phonograph swap notes and opinions on books sing songs from sheet music and relive scenes from motion pictures we've been to see.

A lot of listeners also get to hear their names read out on the show as a mark of our thanks and appreciation. And this week's Select Batch Roll Call is Susan Middleton, Ian Bradshaw and Dom. Before we go, Paula, is there any last message you would like to give listeners about the Godwits fly or Iris Wilkinson, Robin Hyde or any last message for creation? Just that you can on Twitter follow the passage of the Godwits. A lot of them are tagged now. So you can see a little map of them flying.

And one of them got blown off course by a storm and ended up in Australia but still managed to find his way back to the beach. I've been up to Northland to Spirits Bay, really a magical place but yes if you can't get to Spirits Bay get yourself to Twitter. And you can buy this one relatively easily we think don't you because Persephone Books in the UK reissued this novel five years ago. I don't know if it's available in the States, but it must be available in Australia and New Zealand. So, Joe, anything to add? Yeah, I would just say that although Iris Wilkinson's life was ended when she was 33 and she died, and I think Paula captured that

beautifully at the end, that the sense of life sense of life bubbling out in all directions from her writing. This is an incredibly intense, sensually rich, interesting, vivid novel. And I think very different in some ways from Catherine Mansfield, though obviously connected to it. I mean, she's a really interesting writer, and I'm definitely going to read more of her stuff. Well, thanks, Paula. Thanks, everyone, for listening.

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